Sometimes I feel like going to visit my family really helps keep me sane. I wish that I had enough time and money to go up to Toronto once a month. Also, there’s something I kind of enjoy about taking buses instead of planes. There’s sort of a thrill to being out on the road, but then again, that could be due to the fact that I’m a New Yorker who doesn’t know how to drive and seldom ever has a reason to be out in a four-wheeled motorized vehicle out on a highway. Also, the feeling that you get after you reach your destination at the end of a trip that takes over ten hours long is bloody fantastic, especially when your destination is a beautiful city that you just had to drive through hundreds of miles of middle American wasteland to reach (is the tri-state area even considered middle America? Check on this.). This is the case for both the journey to Toronto and to New York. Two lovely cities separated by miles upon miles of highways, suburbia, strip malls, billboards, forests, and assorted wasteland, like two points on a graph separated by a line. The fact that you just spent the better part of your day sitting on a bus to get there makes arriving at your destination feel all the more rewarding. It’s kind of similar to the relationship between the effort invested in your work and the result of your work. The harder you work, the more you appreciate your results. This might sound silly, but I had the most tremendous grin spread on my face as the bus burst out of Lincoln Tunnel into the city when I was returning from spring break in Canada.

Spending time in a bus or a car whizzing past myriad trees is also somewhat cathartic.

Also, I hate nearly everything about flying. The only good part is that it’s relatively quick. That said, I’m starting to understand why my boyfriend is completely obsessed with planes. I think I’m starting to develop a curiosity myself. The notion of a vehicle that can muster enough power to overcome the force of gravity is fascinating. I wonder if there’s a good documentary on planes out there. There has to be. I caught myself peering into the cockpit on my last flight. I wonder what it would be like to be a pilot.

[/tangent] The point is, I’m really grateful that I have such a healthy, intimate relationship with my family. Many people don’t.